scrooge-2
Explanation
This comic is a parody of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," filtered through the lens of longtermism and existential risk -- philosophical movements associated with the effective altruism community.
In the original story, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future, who shows him the consequences of his selfish ways. In this version, the ghost is labeled "The Ghost of Christmas Extreme Future" and berates Scrooge not for personal greed, but for failing to find a way to encode or digitize 400 generations of future humans from waste energy -- a reference to longtermist concerns about maximizing the long-term future of humanity and preventing extinction risks.
The bottom panel shows a tiny cyborg descendant who has to "make do" with what appears to be limited resources, saying "DERAAAAARGH." The caption reads: "The Longtermist version of A Christmas Carol is way better."
The humor comes from the absurdity of applying longtermist philosophy to the Dickens framework. While the original story's moral lesson is personal and immediate (be kind, be generous now), the longtermist version scales the guilt to a comically cosmic level -- Scrooge is being shamed not for mistreating Bob Cratchit, but for failing to ensure the prosperity of humanity thousands of years in the future. The comic gently mocks the longtermist tendency to make every moral question about maximizing outcomes across vast timescales, making even a simple Christmas morality tale absurdly grandiose. The claim that this version is "way better" is delivered with obvious irony.